First opened in 1933, Luk Yu Teahouse relocated to its current location in 1976. The building’s colonial façade opens to a three-floor restaurant dripping with nostalgia. Eating at Luk Yu is falling through a time warp.

A dim sum meal easily averages more than HK$100 per person per meal. Some customers are paying for the teahouse’s history and ambiance. Others are long-term patrons who stay all day.

Hard-to-find items harkening back four or five decades make up the menu, such as excellent liver siu mai and deep-fried dumplings in soup.

Service is notoriously bad and wait staff are intimidating to non-regulars. So much so that it has become a signature of the restaurant.

Best vegetarian for meat-lovers: M Garden Vegetarian
Meat-free dim sum might seem an improbable venture, but at M Garden you won’t even notice the lack of animal on your table.

As with most vegetarian Chinese restaurants, the meat here is replaced with bean curd and mushrooms, but where M Garden stands apart is its emphasis on unusual textures that don’t slavishly try to resemble meat, like the coarsely packed imitation beef balls.

Even more interesting are the standard vegetarian dishes found on every dim sum menu.

Here, the radish cake is made with mushroom and peppers, then diced and stir-fried.

The steamed egg custard buns are made with whole wheat flour, which gives them more heft and a breadier taste than the usual white flour variety.

Best sense of community: Lam Kee (林記點心)
There’s something about the tile floors, high ceilings and boisterous atmosphere of a wet market food hall that makes a meal more fun than it might otherwise be.

The portions here are small, but also inexpensive -- mostly less than HK$10 -- which allows for plenty of ordering experimentation.

Particularly memorable are the bean curd wraps, which contain an assortment of ingredients that work together remarkably well, like baby corn, taro, chicken and spam.

The black bean spareribs are fantastic and so are the tiny har gau.

But the best part of any meal is the company. At the Tai Po Hui food court, patrons sit in a communal dining area. Neighbors run into each other as they head to the food stalls for a break during a grocery run.

If it's early morning, grannies fueling up for an afternoon of mahjong make conversation over a pot of tea.

Best taxi driver's pit stop: Yue Fu Kitchen (裕富小廚)
Dim sum 24 hours a day is taken for granted here in Hong Kong. When we get those midnight cravings, Yue Fu is one of our top choices for getting a Hong Kong dim sum fix.

Taxis are parked outside Yue Fu in Tai Wai every night as the drivers have a meal inside -- it's a sign the food and value are both great.

The most expensive dim sum is only HK$18 at Yue Fu. They only serve steamed dim sum and not every dim sum is perfect (forget about the har gau here). But it is the local way of experiencing dim sum that we are aiming for.

Blend in by sitting outside, washing your utensils in hot water and pouring out the water onto the street.

The dim sum menu is full of classics that have been given novel twists. Lobster and scallop in a thin wrapper resemble decadent siu mai. Cheung fun is filled with garoupa. Dumplings are stuffed with duck liver.

The hotel-ness of the place can't be dimissed. Service is a bit mechanical and halfway through the meal, we start craving the controlled chaos of a typical Cantonese restaurant.

But Lung King Heen isn't a typical Cantonese restaurant. It's the kind of place where Jack Donaghy would go for an intense round of negotiations over an aged Pu-erh tea.